Treat Your Employees Well and Take Time to Talk About Life

At TSP, we are all about making things personal. This reaches well beyond the customized services we provide for our clients and is something we pride ourselves on doing well internally. Just a few weeks ago, I got a text from my boss, VP, Managing Director, Chad Thompson, asking if we could talk “about life” at 5 pm on a Friday. Of course thinking the worst, I woefully accepted his meeting invitation. When the phone rang a few hours later, I had already thought back on every interaction I had over the past week and was trying to pinpoint exactly what I had done wrong. Much to my surprise, when Chad called all of his questions were around what I had going on that weekend and how my golf game was going (the answer is terrible). At TSP our employees are not our greatest asset, they are our company. It's not a catch phrase, it's a way of life.

When I came across this article, I thought about TSP from an internal and external perspective. Internally, as illustrated above, we do a great job. Externally, we are consistently helping clients make good decisions around their people. I remember reading research in graduate school about the power of verbal reinforcement. Tell people they are doing a great job. Let them know they are appreciated. Monetary rewards are forgotten a few weeks after they hit the pay check, genuine admiration is lasting. #experience the power of personal.

Marc is a Director in the Consulting & Assessment practice at Taylor Strategy Partners where he works with clients on improving their performance by using data to better select and develop their people. Dr. Prine earned his Ph.D. in Business Psychology from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, M.A. from West Chester University of Pennsylvania, and undergraduate degree from Temple University. He is an adjunct professor in statistics and his work has been published in Forbes and FastCompany. In his spare time, Marc can be found looking for golf balls in tall grass, yelling as if the players on his fantasy team can hear him through the television or doing his best Andrew Zimmer impression and trying the most interesting thing on a menu.